Motorola announces Project ARA

Building your own PC is past now. Very soon you’ll have the ability to build your own custom smartphone, thanks to the efforts by Motorola.

Project Ara, which is a new and free open hardware platform to create highly modular smartphones has been announced by the Google acquired company.

Motorola Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara team, posted on their blog, “We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”

While, with the release of their flagship smartphone, Moto X, Motorola has already given its user the ability to customize many of the external design elements.

This new project aims at giving the users the ability to design the internals of their phone as well. And the best part is you can change it when you get bored.

The post also mentions that Motorola aims at providing a more thoughtful, expressive and open relationship between users, developers and their phones.

They intend to give a user the power to decide what their phone does, how it looks, the materials used in its build, even its cost and how long do they want to keep it.

Project Ara design comprises of what the company calls an endoskeleton (endo) and different types of modules. The endo will be the structural frame that will hold all the modules in a place, while a module can be anything from a new application processor to a new display, or even a keyboard, extra battery, a pulse oximeter or other customizable hardware unit.

Motorola is working in collaboration with Dave Hakkens, the man behind Phonebloks, a smartphone concept that envisioned the idea of changeable hardware components.

Motorola plans to send invitations to developers to start working on the creation of modules for the Ara platform and also plans an alpha release of the Module Developer’s Kit (MDK) for winter.